Monday, 29 July 2013

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One Direction in Vancouver - A 24 Hour Road Trip

Not all of our trips are well thought out and planned in advance. OK, actually none of our trips are like that, but some are even more scattered and disorganized than others. Two days ago I was spending a lazy Saturday at home with a long list of things that I was going to spend my weekend working on. Then around 3 pm some last minute tickets for One Direction in Vancouver that night came available. This was going to make my daughter's day (and ruin my son's) so we quickly bought some tickets, woke up the kids (yes at 3's summer!), and within sixty minutes we were on our way to Vancouver.

1D concert Vancouver

Now I don't know a lot about One Direction. Sure I know the songs that are big hits on the radio, and they do those great Pepsi commercials with Drew Brees, but outside of that I've always considered them just another boy band. I've seen New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys and I assumed that it would be a show similar to that, but something was different this time. Something happened that turned me into a real 1D fan (That's how us true fans refer to the band....apparently) and while it's a little hard to explain, let me try to do it by telling you what I learned about the boys of One Direction during the show:

1D in Vancouver One Direction

This is Liam: As you can tell, Liam probably spends a lot of time at the gym. To prove this, Liam's job is to take his shirt off in the video scenes that air between the songs of the concert. This causes the audience to scream A LOT! Actually everything Liam does causes the audience to scream. At one point he threw confetti in the air and the audience lost it's freaking mind. I tried throwing confetti in the air once. I got a dirty look from my wife and told to go get the broom.

1D in Vancouver One Direction

This is Zayn: Zayn's job is to repeatedly mention the city that the band is in that night. This causes the audience to scream every time their city is mentioned, but it was especially cute on Saturday night as Zayn seems to have a problem properly pronouncing Vancouver. It kept coming out like "Van-cool-vah". It didn't matter. The audience screamed every time they heard a word starting with V, just to be safe.

1D in Vancouver One Direction

This is Louis: Louis has a very simple job in One Direction. It's his job to tell the audience to "Scream!" Needless to say, this causes the audience to scream, but I'm not sure Louis should get all the credit for this. As my son put it, "If people can't hear you telling them to scream because of all the screaming then your job is probably redundant." I'm proud of my son, not only for his keen observational skills but also for remembering how to use the word redundant while off school for the summer.

1D in Vancouver One Direction

This is Niall: Despite the fact that all of the members of One Direction claim publicly that they can't dance, Niall's job seems to be to dance. He busts out some crazy moves that look sort of bizarre to me, but they must be really good because every move he makes causes the audience to scream loudly. Of course at one point he stumbled a little and the audience screamed even louder, so I probably don't really understand these modern day dance moves as well as I think I do. 

1D in Vancouver One Direction

This is Harry: Most people know who Harry is from his brief romance with Taylor Swift, but I'm here to tell you that Harry has a far more important job than just dating country superstars. Harry also seems to be in charge of the group's water supply. Seriously, every time Harry came over to our side of the stage he would stop and grab a couple of bottles of water, open them both, place them strategically around the stage, then run off because he was supposed to be on the other side of the stage by then. Every time Harry opened a bottle of water, the audience would scream. If Harry actually paused for a second to take a drink of water, the audience really screamed. If Harry accidentally spilled a little water while drinking the arena was thrown into chaos. They might want to get Harry a sippy cup before somebody gets hurt.

1D concert in Vancouver

This is Neve: She is my daughter and was one of the 18,000 people who's job on Saturday night was to scream. Do you see the happy look on her face? That's why I'm a One Direction fan now. I may not understand the appeal of confetti throwing or water drinking, but I understand things that make my daughter happy. That smile made it worth the sixty minute notice for departure. It made it worth the hassle of waking my son up mid-afternoon (Actually that was kind of fun. "Wait...what? I have to go WHERE?"). It made it worth the four hour drive each way and the ridiculousness that is the Vancouver freeway system at the moment. In short, it was worth it. There's not that many moments in life when you get to make your child really, really happy so I'm very thankful that we got to take advantage of this one. Or at least I will be once I get my hearing back again. Seriously, they scream at everything.

A little taste of what the show was about, with the caveat that last minute tickets tend not to have very good sightlines...

Written by Steve Pratt